[jawzz]

From the dissenting opinion by Commissioner Noah Joshua Phillips:

> These are different companies, some of which have strikingly different business models. And the orders omit other companies engaged in business practices similar to recipients, for example, Apple, Gab, GroupMe, LinkedIn, Parler, Rumble, and Tumblr, not to mention other firms the data practices of which have drawn significant government concern, like WeChat. The only plausible benefit to drawing the lines the Commission has is targeting a number of high profile companies and, by limiting the number to nine, avoiding the review process required under the Paperwork Reduction Act, which is not triggered if fewer than ten entities are subject to requests.

[duskwuff]

> The only plausible benefit to drawing the lines the Commission has is targeting a number of high profile companies

It's almost as though the majority of the Commission recognizes that its resources are limited, and that going on a wild goose chase investigating a bunch of smaller social media companies would simply ensure that nothing would be accomplished.

Apple isn't even a social media company. I have no idea why they'd be included.

Gab, Parler, and Rumble are all smaller social media sites targeting the alt-right. They're so much smaller than any of the services being investigated that I feel like even mentioning them here is a dog whistle.

LinkedIn is explicitly targeted at adult professionals. That puts it a bit outside the scope of the investigation as well; one of its focuses is "how [these sites'] practices affect children and teens".

[_2d30]

By some metrics, iMessage is the biggest messaging service in the US. Arguably, from the POV of the FTC as a US regulator, WhatsApp shouldn't be included but Apple SHOULD be.

This is of course ignoring other social features of Apple products such as Game Center, Find My Friends and Facetime.

[josho]

Apple Message is a message service. Its features include a way to personalize messages. It's not collecting personal/demographic information, it's not trying to increase user engagement (addictiveness), it's not serving ads. So, it clearly is outside the scope of the information that the FTC is trying to gather.

[_2d30]

> It's not collecting personal/demographic information

Sure is! On my iCloud account, Apple has my address, my location, the location of all of my devices, my Apple Card is tied directly to purchases, and much more!

Did you know iMessage specifically even used to be linked directly to Facebook's evil social graph?

> it's not trying to increase user engagement (addictiveness)

Citation? I would bet a large amount of money that Apple is trying to increase engagement. Why do you think they make products like memoji or features like pinned threads?

> it's not serving ads.

True! But, uh, is WhatsApp? https://www.wsj.com/articles/whatsapp-backs-off-controversia...

Here's iMessage generating revenue through the sale of Apps that integrate with it: https://www.fastcompany.com/3063925/apples-imessage-economy-...

Did you know the App Store has a recommendation system to suggest apps to you? It's based on the other apps that you purchase and possibly other signals that I'm not aware of. Apple, of course, gets its 30% cut of that.

[jiofih]

iMessage is a pure messaging service - there are no recommendations, no feed, no following friends, no status updates, no likes, no profiles, no stories, and no connection to Facebook at all. Most importantly, no advertising since they actually make money off the products, which means no incentive for gaming engagement metrics. They want you to have a good time and sell you another device next year, not glue your eyeballs to the screen.

Since there is no “Apple social network” to be spoken of, there would be little reason to include them.

[jldugger]

> no likes, no profiles, and no connection to Facebook at all

You can absolutely thumbs up stuff. And accounts do have a profile -- a name, a phone number, a profile pic, email address, probably your apple ID somewhere in the metadata, etc. And this is not connected to Facebook, but to your Apple account. All your activity is sync'd between devices.

> Since there is no “Apple social network” to be spoken of, there would be little reason to include them.

In a sense, iCloud is the social network: https://www.androidauthority.com/green-bubble-phenomenon-102.... Beyond being able to send special effects with your chats, you can also send money via apple pay, video call via FaceTime, and, with Apple One, share your subscriptions.

> They want you to have a good time and sell you another device next year, not glue your eyeballs to the screen.

True, but what do you think the metrics execsy are thinking of when they introduce thread replies or Memoji? And with Fitness+, News+, TV+ and Apple Arcade, more and more of Apple is increasingly reliant on customers paying them for the privilege of staring at screens.

[HexagonalKitten]

Well, if they did Apple could respond with a few short pages (targeting: none, ads: none, etc.) of info compared to the terabytes the social companies would need.

[_2d30]

Apple's great luck here is that everyone thinks of social media primarily in aesthetic ways that are linked to ideas of social media that they don't like.

> there are no recommendations, no feed, no following friends, no status updates, no likes, no profiles, no stories, and no connection to Facebook at all.

So because Apple doesn't have, in your view, some of the above, extremely limited, set of things they have no social networking properties in your view. It's revealing that "no connection to Facebook at all" is of such prime importance in the determination of Apple's products not being social media that it is specifically listed here. You're arguing what makes a product social so clearly based on a narrow set of specific features that you have ill-will toward but not on questions of the actual social nature of the products.

Under your asserted set of features which define social media, Messenger from Facebook only fails on being associated with Facebook and having stories! WhatsApp only fails due to Status and being associated with Facebook.

Apple used to have a product that was formerly known as "Find My Friends". It's wrapped into an app now called Find My, where you can follow the locations of your friends throughout the world. It integrates really nicely with other apps in Apple's portfolio like FaceTime and iMessage. One of its key features is to notify you when a friend of yours enters/leaves a location. It's about as close to "following friends" as it gets. Now for you, I imagine that your argument is that you are following physical locations of your friends with this app, not broadcast digital content so it's different and is therefore not social media. This seems like an extremely narrow view of social media that ignores the "social" aspect. Hard to understand how anyone would assert an app called "Find My Friends" isn't social!

> Most importantly, no advertising since they actually make money off the products, which means no incentive for gaming engagement metrics.

Why is it that engagement can only be useful for advertising? If Apple packaged a whole bunch of terrible apps that no one wanted to use (ie had low engagement) into its OS, do you think the demand would be so high for them? I don't. Neither do you, I think, as you make clear in the next sentence:

> They want you to have a good time and sell you another device next year, not glue your eyeballs to the screen.

What do you think represents having a good time in iMessage? For me, I would probably measure it by repeated usage under some metric like sends. The more someone uses iMessage to communicate with other people on iMessage, the more likely they are to not want to leave the Apple ecosystem. This is a real phenomenon. The shame of being a green bubble is very real in some circles. If the functionality of iMessage didn't vary between in-network and out-of-network messages, it would be completely fair to suggest that iMessage is a "pure messaging app" in the sense that GMail is just an email service. On GMail, my emails go across email services and work the same way in any scenario. In iMessage, if you're a pleb on Android, I can't do dozens of things with you that I can when communicating to my contacts on iMessage.

> Since there is no “Apple social network” to be spoken of, there would be little reason to include them.

This is just false beyond your aesthetic assertions of what social media is! Game Center explicitly has a "friends" concept as does Find My. iMessage doesn't call your contacts friends but if you have an iCloud account associated to a contact what's the difference beyond aesthetic conceptions? You have a closed network where you can socialize with others.

If your definition of social media is "has the features of Facebook Apps or is associated with Facebook" then I get why Apple doesn't have social media properties. If your definition of social media is "closed ecosystem services that enable you to interact socially with chosen individuals" then Apple clearly has social media properties.

[roland-s]

iMessage is E2EE (according to Apple). But Apple can still see who's messaging who. With that you get an intimate social graph. Similar to what the NSA has on US citizens via phone records. Apple also says they don't sell your personal info to advertisers. But they can still use that data however they like, and there's nothing stopping them from selling that data at some point in the future.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Why would they want to sell it. They could license access to it for recurring revenue, like other Big Tech companies.

The most important control that customers should seek is not control over the sale/transfer of data, it is control over how the data may be used, by anyone. For example, if the data comes with terms that say it cannot be used for advertising purposes, then what are the chances anyone can sell it to advertisers.

The "We do not/will not sell your data" line is a deliberate red herring, of no more value than "We take security very seriously".

(Great comment, BTW.)

[edoceo]

LinkedIn is social, and would have made a nice even 10 - which would trigger an oversight event.

[duskwuff]

Edited my post with some more details. While LinkedIn is a social media site of sorts, it's outside what I believe the focus of the investigation to be.

[bilbo0s]

LinkedIn has a lot of teens on it actually. Very talented teens some, others are teens of average talent level. But they do have teens. They are also about 3 times bigger than discord. I think you could argue either way, because there may be a larger absolute number of teens on discord? The numbers are not broken out enough to tell. But given the nature of what we're dealing with, I wouldn't discount the idea of them not wanting anyone taking a closer look at what they are doing.

I myself am always suspicious of the "Think of the children!!!" crowd.

[josho]

Somehow if my teenaged kids spent as much time in LinkedIn networking business relationships as they did in Snapchat I wouldn't quite mind as much.

Regardless, I think you've missed the part where the FTC said what they were gathering information on, e.g. "how[social media] practices affect children and teens."

[bilbo0s]

I think you've missed the part where the FTC said what they were gathering information on, e.g. "how[social media] practices affect children and teens."

I didn't miss that part.

That's why I said that I don't trust people who say they are "thinking of the children". If you trust their intentions, well, we can peaceably agree to disagree.

[bonestamp2]

I agree that LinkedIn probably has some similar risks to the sites that have been issued response orders. But, if the goal is create legislation around those risks, I'm not sure it is necessary (at this time) to also query LinkedIn (and the many other sites with similar risks). The ones on the list can likely provide enough information for this initial inquiry.

[duskwuff]

Does LinkedIn have some children among its users? Sure.

Is LinkedIn targeting those users with its product? No.

Does LinkedIn have a business strategy surrounding those users? Probably not.

Is the way that LinkedIn interacts with these users going to be illustrative of larger industry trends? I doubt it.

[rileymat2]

> Apple isn't even a social media company

It is not primarily a social media company but they have a big portfolio which includes social features, one example, I can link friends to my apple watch exercise app.

[zepto]

Sharing exercise data with a small group of friends is nothing like what people mean when they say ‘Social Media’

[renewiltord]

Can you justify why Amazon should be covered and Apple shouldn't be? Your justification applies to both.

[duskwuff]

Amazon owns Twitch, which is both a social media site and a video streaming service.

[renewiltord]

Very reasonable.

[HexagonalKitten]

> social media sites targeting the alt-right

Parler's front page makes no mention of this. Pls source.

Or, do you just mean that they take the people who get kicked off of twitter? Because then, yeah - if you kick people off one place they'll tend to be found somewhere else.

[elliekelly]

Commissioner Phillips makes a pretty disingenuous argument. The purpose of FTC Act Section 6(b), as I'm sure Phillips well knows, is to collect information in order to inform the FTC's ability to propose policy and legislation. In fact reports written from 6(b) requests are often called "studies" or "policy research" in the media.

> These are different companies, some of which have strikingly different business models.

That's usually the goal when you're sampling how an industry operates.

And so disingenuous are the other points he makes that I honestly don't believe Phillips believes most of what he's written. But when I got to the sentence where he called the FTC's privacy staff "the most impactful privacy enforcers in the world" and the FTC's regulation of consumer privacy "an effective enforcement program" it's hard to take anything else he says seriously.

I'll admit I did get a kick out of him citing Executive Order 13892[1] which basically says government agencies must be "fair and transparent" when collecting information from regulated entities. How deliciously ironic he's willing to put his foot down in the name of unfair, confusing, and overly broad information gathering.

[1]https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/10/15/2019-22...

[ineedasername]

I see no problem focusing on the largest companies that rely on personal data.

The "10 entities limit" doesn't seem like an inappropriate use of a loophole here. You have draw the line somewhere. Look at the largest and use them to make the general guidelines (or new laws) that will govern all companies. Then look at other companies as needed

[trhway]

>Paperwork Reduction Act

sounds funny as they just disturbed the hives of the probably best financed legal departments out there and they did it using the core issue for the companies owning those legal departments.

[jessaustin]

Hey that sounds good! They can issue another order next month, etc. Why did he dissent?

[feedbackwelcome]

Hi jawzz, if you don't mind someone would like to ask you these questions:

>I have a question for this user, since he/she chose a good section to quote (it means he/she really looked into it).

>I'd be really interested in his/her opinion or thoughts, and or any other kind of feedback:

>Yesterday there was a widely reported leak of 2 million embedded agents of a foreign government (you can see it in dozens of places).

>I'd ask this user, does he/she think that this FTC order could be by one of these embedded agents in order to gather private information about citizens, for the purposes of censorship?

>I noticed that a few days ago [5 days ago], YouTube has a controversial censorship policy, [it generated 3055 comments when discussed on Hacker News]. Videos discussing political opinion on a certain topic without calling for violence are removed.

>I'd like to just keep it to the facts of whether this FTC action could, in this user's opinion, be part of such a thing. [Gathering information on users for the purposes of censorship]

Thanks for any opinion or feedback.